Jedidiah Ballard is the 2016 Ultimate Men's Health Guy

For the third year in a row, it’s our pleasure to announce the results of the Ultimate Men’s Health Guy competition. We love to champion healthy, fit guys, but our passion is honoring men who help others—men who raise families, strengthen communities, and serve their country.

This year’s winner is Jedidiah Ballard, D.O., and he fits that description perfectly.

His win was revealed on this morning’s Today on NBC—and he’ll appear on the cover of the November issue of Men’s Health, available on newsstands and for download on Tuesday, October 11.

Read on for his incredible story.

Paige Carlotti

On Christmas day, 2010, Ballard was a relatively new intern on duty at Augusta University Medical Center in Georgia. He got a 3 a.m. call to rush to the ambulance bay.

“I sprinted outside,” recalls Ballard, “and found a man in the passenger seat of a pickup truck, blood gushing from his neck,” apparently the result of a knife fight over a girl.

The guy’s jugular had been nicked. Ballard knew that if he didn’t act immediately, the man in the truck would become the dead body in the truck.

“I shoved a T-shirt into the wound and kept my hands there, applying pressure on his neck until we were in the operating room,” he says. “Three days later the guy walked out of the hospital, totally fine. It was the first time I realized I could do this—that I really was an ER doctor.”

Soon after his residency, Ballard found himself in another life-or-death environment. He served two years as a battalion surgeon with the Rangers in Afghanistan, taking care of the medical needs of both his group and the Afghan Special Operations soldiers his unit was tasked to help train.

Then he survived U.S. Army Ranger School, the notoriously demanding course that pushes candidates to their absolute mental and physical limits for 61 days.

But at 32, Ballard was nearly a decade older than most of the other Ranger trainees, and with his shaved head he was just another grunt, not a doctor. The course is tough enough for guys in their 20s; more than a third fail in the first four days.

“One time we stayed up all night doing air squats for hours,” he says. “Then we got one hour of sleep and had to hike 12 miles in under three hours with a 45-pound rucksack.”

Of the 386 men who signed up for Army Ranger School, just 31 made it to graduation. Ballard was one of them.

“I’m not going to lie. It sucked,” he says, laughing. “But the experience gave me a valuable perspective on life. Whenever I’m extremely tired or hungry or working late, I can always look back and say, ‘Shut up, Ranger. You’ve been through much worse.’”

His Army days may be behind him, but his Ranger perspective goes with him everywhere.

For example, along with his ER duties, Ballard has completed a Special Forces medical tech dive course in Key West, won a 17-mile adventure race, finished the World’s Toughest Mudder—a punishing 24-hour obstacle race—and climbed Mt. Hood by himself in a $20 pair of Walmart boots.

These efforts reflect the man Ballard has become—one who prioritizes education and fitness—and they’ve paid off.

John Loomis

Take that six-pack: Ballard works out six days a week and has a few favorite ab moves.

These include flutter kicks (lie on your back, raise your legs, and kick 400 times); hanging buddy punches (hang on a bar and have a friend lightly hit you in the abs and obliques for 30 seconds); and floor sweepers (lie on your back, raise a 135-pound barbell over your chest, and lift your legs to the bar 30 times, switching from right to middle to left).

But if you ask Ballard about the best use he’s made of his free time, he’d probably tell you about his volunteer work in Peru and Panama, where he goes, often at his own expense, to teach doctors how to use ultrasound equipment to diagnose blood clots and other conditions, such as appendicitis.

“We train them in the technology so they can take better care of their people,” he says. “While we’re there, we’ll also give people free diagnostics.”

In one patient they found a pulmonary embolism that might have gone undetected until it was too late.

“We were able to immediately give her anticoagulants and improve her condition,” he says.

If he’s not way, way down south, Ballard is at a burn survivor youth camp in Colorado. During one trip, he remembers helping a kid with compromised respiration climb a mountain for the first time—literally a breathtaking experience.

The boy had to go slower than the rest of the group, so Ballard hung back to help him along. It was very slow going, one wheezing step at a time, until they eventually reached the top of the mountain.

“The sun’s coming up and we finally get to the summit—way behind everyone else—and like 80 other kids are there running around having a party, and he got to join in the fun.”

The sheer exhilaration of such experiences cuts to the core of why Ballard became a physician and a Ranger.

“Sure, I love traveling, seeing new places, and helping people,” he says. “But I also feel really lucky. I grew up lower-middle class—literally in a barn at one point—and now I’m a doctor. America has been good to me. I have the desire to give back.”

That’s ultimate enough, you may be thinking. Nobody gives that much time and energy without wanting something in return. A lot of people use altruism as fuel for their ambitions—whether it’s a local mayor serving soup to win votes or, just maybe, a good-hearted doc who wants to be on the cover of Men’s Health.

But those who know Ballard best insist that his dashboard-saint persona isn’t a put-on.

“Jed is always optimistic,” says Dan McCollum, M.D., assistant residency director at the Medical College of Georgia. “He’s perpetually ready for adventure, and he never lets tough circumstances bring down his mood.”

Ballard’s also perpetually on the lookout for chances to do more of what he does best—help people.

On one of his trips home from Colorado he met Zech, an 18-year-old who’d dropped out of high school and was living on his own. Rather than finish school, Zech’s plan was to work on a pig farm to help cover his rent.

Despite the appeal of a pig-farming paycheck, Zech was able to consider an even better idea. Ballard had recently finished building a huge cabin on a bluff in Montana for his parents, a place where they could live rent-free.

“My family started the place when I was growing up,” he says.

The project stalled, and after over a decade it was languishing. So earlier this year, Ballard hired one of his best friends to finish the job. Ballard helped with the foundation and stacked logs. The result: a 5,000-squarefoot lodge sitting on 10 acres with views of Glacier National Park.

“Now they can live out their days,” he says, “and I’ll always have an amazing place to go back and visit.”

Enter Zech. The kid was given a multiple-choice quiz: Would you rather 1) slop hogs? Or 2) get support to go back to school?

Zech aced the exam, so on the spot, Ballard made him a proposal: If he’d help around the cabin, maintain at least a 2.5 GPA, and not use drugs, he could live there rent-free while attending high school.

Zech accepted.

“He’ll also probably have to help my dad fix up some old cars,” Ballard says, laughing.

Asked why he would trust a total stranger to live with his aging parents, he pauses briefly. “You’re only given so many chances to truly change someone’s life,” he says. “You have to seize them.”

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